I’m a patent holder and I train patent examiners on technology topics so I often see and sometimes work with the folks at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). If all you know about the USPTO is what you read in the newspapers you should attend some events where you’ll meet the folks that work there. If have found most of the staff that I’ve encountered to be courteous, hard-working, caring, and really trying to do the right thing as often as possible. They have a pretty tough job, though, so it’s hard to know what’s right or wrong (I think they do pretty well).

If you think the patent process is broken or would like to learn more about it, I just got an email announcement this morning that you would find useful:

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is holding a two-day conference to address the intellectual property needs of small and medium sized businesses, entrepreneurs, and independent inventors interested in manufacturing or selling their products abroad.

March 27 ??? Presentations to help conference attendees identify intellectual property assets and discuss the steps needed to protect those assets in the United States and abroad. Major presentations will cover patents, trademarks, copyright, and trade secrets.

March 28 ??? Presentations focusing on enforcement issues that may arise in protecting intellectual property rights in the United States and abroad including: patent, trademark, and copyright infringement; unfair competition; counterfeiting; and piracy.

This conference will also include one-on-one consultations between the USPTO attorneys and conference attendees on Monday and Tuesday afternoons.

This program is part of the Federal Government???s Strategy Targeting Organized Piracy (STOP) and the USPTO???s continuing commitment to increase public awareness of intellectual property rights and the enforcement of those rights in the global marketplace.

There is no charge to attend this event, but seating is limited and registration is required.

An editor from a large health IT publication with both a print and online presence has asked me if I know any folks looking to do any freelance writing on “practical” health IT topics. If you’re interested, drop me a note.

The AAFP has a shiny new white paper with tips on how to use EHRs in the exam room.

They say “with a thoughtful approach, you can maintain your focus on the patient.” In their introduction they point out that most people talk about how to buy and deploy EHRs but that “minimal attention has been paid to understanding how family physicians use EHRs with patients in the examination room.”

I agree.

Here are the ten tips they mention in the white paper (many items taken verbatim, some with minor edits):

Use mobile monitors. We recommend investing in either flat-screen monitors on mobile arms, tablet computers or laptop computers.

Learn how to type and use a mouse and use Google and MS Word.

Integrate typing around your patients’ needs — which means it is important to know when to push the computer screen away.

Use templates for documentation, not for patient interviews, which require room for an open-ended narrative.

Separate some routine data entry and health-care maintenance issues from your patient encounters. Until patients are able to complete forms online in your waiting room or at home, consider having office nurses or medical assistants enter basic information before you walk into the exam room.

Rather than walking straight to the monitor following only a brief greeting, consider listening to the patient???s concerns before opening the screen to review the last visit???s notes.

Tell your patient what you’re doing as you’re doing it. Try to keep talking as you go about the work of both searching for and entering data into the EHR.

Use a finger, pen or cursor to guide the patient???s gaze when discussing data viewed on the monitor.

Dmitriy over at HealthVoices just posted about the medical blog aggregating “debate”. In case you’re not aware, HealthVoices is both a medical blog content aggregator and a blogging community where medical bloggers can get national recoginition for their writing.

I met Dmitriy at HIMSS and I was impressed by his knowledge, dedication to the medical community, and his innovative ideas about how something like HealthVoices could help physicians and other healthcare providers get messages out to patients and citizens. Dmitriy is a pretty nice guy so I was quite surprised at the “lynch mob” mentality (his words) that other bloggers seem to have about him aggregating not only links but actual postings from their blogs. I’m a little disappointed by how he’s publicly being chastised and how he’s being treated by some members of the blogosphere.

Now, I’m a blogger (i write several including this one) and I personally don’t like aggregators publishing my entire post but I do want them to publish my links. Although I feel strongly about it, I think the approach that Barbados Butterfly took in her complaint started a public fight that needn’t have been one. While I agree with Barbados Butterfly’s points, it was handled publicly which makes Dmitriy look like a villain when what he’s doing is trying to serve the community.

Fellow bloggers: if you find someone on the Internet doing something that you don’t like, please don’t take it public until you’ve tried to resolve the issue privately. Regardless of how egregious you think the offense is, it’s possible that another fellow blogger or site manager may have a different opinion and is willing to rectify your complaint quickly and quietly. Always try and resolve the problem via private e-mail first, see what the response is, and then if you need help from the community to resolve your grievance even have some fellow bloggers send email to threaten action. If Dmitriy was approached properly, I think he would have changed the policy and posted about the policy change along with the reasons (requests from the community). It would have been quick and painless for everyone.

By making all grievances public it makes us bloggers look like we are a bunch of cry babies that throw tantrums; and, it makes it more difficult to be taken seriously. I talk to many PR people who are afraid of sharing things with us sometimes because they think nothing is private. When I was at HIMSS I was wearing a “I’m a blogger” button so that everyone knew I was a blogger. Many of them would immediately stop talking or carefully choosing their words as soon as they find out they were speaking to a blogger. I assured them that before I wrote anything about anyone I ask permission because it’s the right thing to do. The blogosphere is not a different world: regular rules of etiquette do apply.

Quick note to Barbados Butterfly: you were 100% right that you should decide whether your posts are published or not and in the absence ofany information Dmitriy probably shouldn’t have published your posts. But, since I know Dmitriy I think he’s been raked over the coals needlessly for what you believe to be a mistake he made (he would have easily corrected had he been approached about it privately).

The AAFP has a shiny new white paper with tips on how to use EHRs in the exam room.

They say “with a thoughtful approach, you can maintain your focus on the patient.” In their introduction they point out that most people talk about how to buy and deploy EHRs but that “minimal attention has been paid to understanding how family physicians use EHRs with patients in the examination room.”

I agree.

Here are the ten tips they mention in the white paper (many items taken verbatim, some with minor edits):

Use mobile monitors. We recommend investing in either flat-screen monitors on mobile arms, tablet computers or laptop computers.

Learn how to type and use a mouse and use Google and MS Word.

Integrate typing around your patients’ needs — which means it is important to know when to push the computer screen away.

Use templates for documentation, not for patient interviews, which require room for an open-ended narrative.

Separate some routine data entry and health-care maintenance issues from your patient encounters. Until patients are able to complete forms online in your waiting room or at home, consider having office nurses or medical assistants enter basic information before you walk into the exam room.

Rather than walking straight to the monitor following only a brief greeting, consider listening to the patient???s concerns before opening the screen to review the last visit???s notes.

Tell your patient what you’re doing as you’re doing it. Try to keep talking as you go about the work of both searching for and entering data into the EHR.

Use a finger, pen or cursor to guide the patient???s gaze when discussing data viewed on the monitor.

Dmitriy over at HealthVoices just posted about the medical blog aggregating “debate”. In case you’re not aware, HealthVoices is both a medical blog content aggregator and a blogging community where medical bloggers can get national recoginition for their writing.

I met Dmitriy at HIMSS and I was impressed by his knowledge, dedication to the medical community, and his innovative ideas about how something like HealthVoices could help physicians and other healthcare providers get messages out to patients and citizens. Dmitriy is a pretty nice guy so I was quite surprised at the “lynch mob” mentality (his words) that other bloggers seem to have about him aggregating not only links but actual postings from their blogs. I’m a little disappointed by how he’s publicly being chastised and how he’s being treated by some members of the blogosphere.

Now, I’m a blogger (i write several including this one) and I personally don’t like aggregators publishing my entire post but I do want them to publish my links. Although I feel strongly about it, I think the approach that Barbados Butterfly took in her complaint started a public fight that needn’t have been one. While I agree with Barbados Butterfly’s points, it was handled publicly which makes Dmitriy look like a villain when what he’s doing is trying to serve the community.

Fellow bloggers: if you find someone on the Internet doing something that you don’t like, please don’t take it public until you’ve tried to resolve the issue privately. Regardless of how egregious you think the offense is, it’s possible that another fellow blogger or site manager may have a different opinion and is willing to rectify your complaint quickly and quietly. Always try and resolve the problem via private e-mail first, see what the response is, and then if you need help from the community to resolve your grievance even have some fellow bloggers send email to threaten action. If Dmitriy was approached properly, I think he would have changed the policy and posted about the policy change along with the reasons (requests from the community). It would have been quick and painless for everyone.

By making all grievances public it makes us bloggers look like we are a bunch of cry babies that throw tantrums; and, it makes it more difficult to be taken seriously. I talk to many PR people who are afraid of sharing things with us sometimes because they think nothing is private. When I was at HIMSS I was wearing a “I’m a blogger” button so that everyone knew I was a blogger. Many of them would immediately stop talking or carefully choosing their words as soon as they find out they were speaking to a blogger. I assured them that before I wrote anything about anyone I ask permission because it’s the right thing to do. The blogosphere is not a different world: regular rules of etiquette do apply.

Quick note to Barbados Butterfly: you were 100% right that you should decide whether your posts are published or not and in the absence of any information Dmitriy probably shouldn’t have published your posts. But, since I know Dmitriy I think he’s been raked over the coals needlessly for what you believe to be a mistake he made (he would have easily corrected had he been approached about it privately).

The EHRVA Interoperability Roadmap is available. Here’s how they describe it:

The EHRVA Interoperability Roadmap supports the national goal of interoperable electronic health records and provides a pragmatic, logical plan that will succeed when adopted and implemented by key stakeholders. We provide this Roadmap to mobilize the leadership of healthcare organizations, information technology vendors and other relevant stakeholders to collectively deliver on the vision by incorporating this Roadmap into their plans.

The roadmap is an interesting piece of literature but is not too useful for actually implementing anything specific. They touch on the general problems of interoperability and how industry can get towards a solution without requiring government action. Worth reading.

The Royal Society of Medicine is running the third annual Handheld Computers in Medicine workshop on 6th April in London. The workshop is a day long event split into two streams, one for beginners chaired by Dr Chris Paton (New Media Medicine) and one for more advanced users chaired by Dr Mo Al-Ubaydli (Mo.md). Handheld computers will be provided for the day for participants to follow along with the demonstrations and try out medical software applications. This event will be useful for any doctors interested in getting started with PDAs, what medical software they need and how to use it. The advanced stream will help more experienced users set up PDA projects in their hospitals and discuss important issues such as security, contracts and training other users.

More details of the sessions and how to register are available at Doctors’ Gadgets and there is a thread for any questions about the event on the Doctors’ Gadgets Forum.

Artima Developer recently started a discussion on How and When to Develop Domain-Specific Languages. It was a good discussion and made me think about a couple of DSLs I’d written for healthcare during my dot-com CTO days. I was wondering if others had done the same and whether they’d like to share their DSLs with the rest of the healthcare IT community.